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What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and ju
by fckgw 4mo ago
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
- andrei_says_ 4mo agoThe incentive to replace employees with ai systems? VS. the inadequacy of ai systems (nondeterministic output, no reference with reality, unknown signal to noise ratio, low effort etc).
- gambiting 4mo agoIt's like how these automated call handlers that say "Just tell us what you need help with" and then no matter how you phrase the sentence it just doesn't understand what you mean. Great idea in theory, horrendous execution. Bonus points if it automatically disconnects after 3 attempts without finding the right magic word from its dictionary of options.
- JoshTriplett 4mo agoThe answer I always give to "tell us what you need help with" is "representative" or "speak to a human". I despise the automated systems that respond to that with "before we can route you to a human, we need to know what you're calling about". Fortunately, some of those will take the continued statement of "representative" as a sign that they should give up and give you a human to talk to. Not all of them, though.
- throw4847285 4mo agoHave you encountered those voicemail AI customer service representatives? Those can't route you anywhere so you're stuck talking to a robot. I was just trying to schedule my daughter's dentist appointment and had to spend 10 minutes talking to an AI when I could have found a time that worked in 30 seconds with a human. And at the end of the whole process, she got my daughter's name wrong. It was demoralizing.
- JoshTriplett 4mo agoI have yet to encounter a phone system that refuses to provide a human, at least within business hours. But I've encountered those online, definitely, that aggressively want to hide any way to reach a person for something that you know in advance will be outside their script.
- throw4847285 4mo agoThis one rings until it's about to go to voicemail, and then all of a sudden a fake dial tone starts and an AI agent picks up. I've only encountered this type for small business owners, like dentist offices and lawyers. But it doesn't seem like there is a way to reach the actual person. I could be wrong though.
- mrgoldenbrown 4mo agoJetblue wouldn't let me talk to a human unless I agreed to pay $25.
- LorenPechtel 4mo agoI've hit phone trees with no path to a human. Haven't gotten stuck on an AI yet, but I'm sure it will happen. The AIs never have the ability to resolve the odd cases.
- coffeefirst 4mo agoSome of them will also give up and escalate if you do a good enough Rahm Emanuel impression.
- PaulHoule 4mo agoMost phone systems will put you through to a human if you pound the 0 enough. The better ones will tell the rep that you did so and they know you are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore and you never have to make the case that they’re going to lose $100,000 NPV because they won’t give you a $500 resolution.
- jcranmer 4mo agoOh fucking hell yes, how much I hate that shit. Bring back the "press 5 for XYZ" phone trees, I never have problems getting the systems to understand what I'm trying to indicate there.
- Evil_Saint 4mo agoI definitely prefer phone trees the ai agents. Something that has never made sense to me is why we even need most of the phone trees. Could they not just have separate numbers? Billing is X num. CS is Y num. Save the human species minutes for every fucking call. I realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do that.
- irishcoffee 4mo agoThey're just filters to see if you actually need help. "They're willing to sit here for 4 minutes listening to prompts and hitting buttons, they must need help" because as we all know, in most cases it doesn't matter which sequence of numbers you press, the same person is going to answer the phone, or same group of people.
- ChoGGi 4mo agoHonestly, sometimes I just hit buttons till I get a human on the line...
- 1718627440 4mo ago> Could they not just have separate numbers? That's what they actually are, you just get an interactive type through for selecting your number. You can just type it all at once if you already know it.
- Atotalnoob 4mo agoPhone numbers cost money, and customers now have to look up 5 different numbers and will inevitably call the wrong number…. Have to wait, get the right number, then call and wait again?
- thayne 4mo agoThey care more about short term cost reduction than long term effects of upsetting customers. Even moreso if there is a lack of significant competition, as is often the case for companies doing this, since customers can't just easily switch to something else.
- PaulHoule 4mo agoI think it is not cost reduction. AI is not cheap. I think it is mimetic and FOMO driven, they think the press release packed with em dashes will 10x their stock price or something.
- theappsecguy 4mo agoit's cheaper than hiring/training/providing benefits and career growth to real humans, at least for now
- oliculipolicula 4mo agoThe ecological achievement of AI was to take the organic fertilizer out of enshittification and turn it into pure sunk cost! Stay tuned for whether it was wind turbines or nuclear..
- LPisGood 4mo agoI recommend everyone in this thread call OpenAI and talk that support agent. I had some issue and tried to trip it up, spoke naturally and ambiguously, and it actually did a pretty good job.
- rpdillon 4mo agoI feel like this is an example of Sturgeon's Law - almost every thread can be filled with complaints, because most everything is crap. What's more interesting is the cases where it isn't. Those prove that the idea can be good, but it's obviously a lot more work than "have an LLM answer customer questions".
- blep-arsh 4mo agoI've asked my bank's support agent about an issue with an app, it also didn't stumble producing a thorough and convincing answer. Entirely wrong, though. Using an LLM to reverse engineer the app turned out to be a much more productive approach.
- npongratz 4mo agoThey don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity, and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.
- 1718627440 4mo agoWhen they don't even want to try the thing, they are allegedly proud of, I would expect them to actually now, that the thing is garbage.
- coldtea 4mo agoThey're proud of their quarterly results, not of the product, that they couldn't care less about. They're not Steve Jobs types. They're glorified bean counters.
- danaris 4mo agoFor many of them, the quarterly results are the product. Thanks to Milton Friedman, far too much of the manager class now believe that the end goal of their job is to make shareholders rich, and the fact that they have to do that by making a product or providing a service is something along the lines of a necessary evil.
- zombot 4mo agoAgreed. And the most horrible thing is, if the numbers do go up, they can actually feel justified.
- eejejq 4mo agolol this is a half truth. Say I start a firm and I want to destroy the incumbent through innovation but can’t pay a very high wage - will the best people who are needed to compete and beat said incumbent forgo a lower salary for the mission? I don’t know. And that’s part of the problem - you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
- Mistletoe 4mo agoIt’s when they see the money they saved that quarter with layoffs. Then the next quarter customer satisfaction is down and they just don’t know why…
- HEmanZ 4mo agoReally? The modern ones I’ve run into lately are like 100x better than the old flows. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 to know our hours. Press 3 if you have a ticket. Press 4 to hear our website address…”. Of course nothing beats a human with real agency at the company but like, these modern agents could be 100x better than what airlines and internet service providers currently have.
- mox1 4mo agoIts being pounded into their head almost daily (and from all directions) that AI is the future and the more AI the better. Their boss, the industry, other managers, heck probably even their children. So any big AI initiative they are apart of had succeeded before it even starts!
- thewebguyd 4mo agoYep, and there's the FOMO aspect. Especially in non-tech/non-product companies right now. Look at the age profile of owners and CEOs. Most of them were around for the dotcom era, and eventually they saw that companies that ignored the internet or didn't adapt where completely left behind. There's a real fear among the C-suite/management that this is the same thing all over again, and if they are not fast enough on the adoption they will lose their business. To them, AI is an existential crisis.
- Henchman21 4mo agoThey don't care. They have metrics to meet and don't care how. Full stop. Have you seen "Severance"? It's a wonderful show that shows us a sick truth: Many people are a different person at work. That different person is devoid of morals & ethics. They are machines intent on meeting metric targets. Nothing else, not managers, not employees, not people, just machines hitting targets they didn't decide on. How could we possibly expect more?
- Balooga 4mo agoThey know, because in their personal capacity, they hate interacting with AI customer service agents from other companies. But their bonus depends on driving down costs in their company.
- lukan 4mo ago"They know, because in their personal capacity, they hate interacting with AI customer service agents from other companies." I believe at a certain level, you have real assistants for that.
- TheGRS 4mo agoIf you can save millions in costs every quarter for the degraded experience, I can see why leaders want to take the risk. Really depends on who is making the calls I guess, for the services that depend on customer experience I would think an AI service agent would probably be out of the question.
- cortesoft 4mo agoIn my experience, AI customer service agents can be really helpful for some things, but when they aren’t helpful they are the most annoying thing in the world. I think this leads to a problem because leadership might see metrics showing that the AI service agent successfully helped with 80% of the questions it is asked, but they don’t realize how damaging that 20% is. Over time, more and more of your customer base is going to hit that 20%, so eventually everyone is pissed off at you. It would be like if 1 in 100 Cheerios in a box were made of poop. It doesn’t matter that most of them are fine, people are going to remember that one cheerio more than the 99 others.
- Applejinx 4mo agoMy analogy for this sort of thing is always sand in the lettuce. It's amazing how easily you can ruin lettuce if it just occasionally crunches against your teeth in that particular way: you start dreading the sensation. You can't see it coming, it's not constant, but it's horrible.
- Atotalnoob 4mo agoUgh thanks, I can feel this in my teeth right now
- randycupertino 4mo ago> the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI I had to call Geico's claims department yesterday and their AI customer service agent had a surfer bro accent, said "no worries" and "hang tight" and "I gotchu" while trying to follow-up on my claim which made it even more infuriating to interact with. Like... stop with the affectations and fake trying to be hip just be professional and succinct please!
- tim333 4mo agoHitchhiker's Guide being prophetic again with its Genuine People Personalities.
- WorldMaker 4mo agoGoodhart's Law will always be a factor, and "the bottom line" is largely the ultimate perverse metric for Goodhart's Law. If doing something everyone hates still has a chance to increase revenue, it's still "winning" to management. Low quality "spam" tactics still reel in enough fish to be monetarily worth the "backlash" from customers that find it distasteful and or start to lose trust in the company. The "We promise we don't spam people" metrics and "Consumer distrust" metrics don't talk enough to the "revenue" metrics, but especially have very different cycles: big customer satisfaction metrics like J. D. Power are big annual things, not quarterly reports like earnings. In my experience things like "how often are we calling the same disinterested people to the point where it starts to feel like very personal spam" metrics don't ever really get prioritized in internal reports unless there's enforcement from Legal departments, and even then Legal departments can't "upset the bottom line" and only care about such compliance when it becomes News and/or Lawsuits, both of which don't even merit even an annual review cycle. (In fact, the modern class action lawsuit pretty effectively prevents that feedback mechanism from cycling, because generally the terms of agreement in a settled class action lawsuit is that the class is no longer allowed to sue again for the same problem, even if the same problem keeps happening and is never actually fixed.) Unless quarterly earnings reports need to include things like client satisfaction and spam tracking, the only metric management will continue to care about, because it also is the only metric shareholders claim to ever care about, is the "bottom line", no matter how ugly the sausage is made to bump it from quarter to quarter.
- LorenPechtel 4mo agoFundamentally, you can convert reputation into current earnings. The former is hard to measure, the latter is much easier to measure. Thus there is a huge incentive for managers to do such. Better run companies tend to understand this problem and are reasonably careful about avoiding it--but when something comes along and upsets the apple cart like AI does they fail to recognize what they are doing.
- Melatonic 4mo agoMoney. Often employees are the largest cost center. The same people who liked outsourcing customer service to cheaper countries are of course going to love doing the same to AI
- pibaker 4mo agoThey don't need to see the problem if their competitors are outsourcing customer service to AI as much as they do. It's like self checkout. Businesses love it because it saves them from employing humans at first world salaries.
- coldtea 4mo ago>where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are They don't care, since the sucker, sorry, the customer, keeps giving them his money
- HumblyTossed 4mo agoThey don't care. They only care about the metrics they were told to meet. They were told reduce headcount and use AI. So that's what they do and they have a spreadsheet to justify the numbers. A lot of times, in management, your goals are conflicting. You're only choice is to maximize them as best you can. If you don't your successor will.